CHAIN-OF-COMMAND TROUBLE

At Monday's summit, Boris Yeltsin and President Clinton decided to let their military men figure out how best to stage a joint peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. Friday afternoon, Russian defense minister Pavel Grachev and his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of Defense William Perry, agreed on a force of "several thousand." But the two sides failed to resolve the central issue: whether the Russian troops will serve under NATO command. Yuri Zarakhovich reports from Moscow: "Yeltsin cannot afford placing Russian units under Western command -- not on the verge of the elections to the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, which will be held in an atmosphere of rapidly mounting and shrill anti-Western xenophobia."